Honoured Society (9 page)
Authors: Norman Lewis
One of Dolci’s informants lists a few of the killings of those days, which leaves out of count the many disappearances – men who were spirited away and never seen again, ‘so that a vendetta could not be sworn in the presence of the corpse’.
The first of them to be killed after the war was a man called Cianciana, probably for political reasons. It happened right in the middle of the square.
Then there was the man whose father was at Belvedere [a prison]. He was an employee and they were afraid he might talk and so they got him out of the way.
Michelangelo Randisio and the son of Uncle Matteo Capra, the one with the withered hand, both disappeared. Their bones were found later. Donna Calorina Saporita’s son had been thrown into the same crevice. They found a whole cart-load of bones there. Angelo Gullota’s bones were there too. Ciccio Navarra’s brother had also disappeared. This crevice is on Monte Casale.
Then there were Grisi’s three brothers. They lived here at Corleone. They found the body of one of them on the railway line. Another brother came home on leave and they bumped him off the very same night near the armourer’s. It seems that the one who came home on leave said that the Mafia here were good for nothing but toothpicks. They heard him and killed him the same day. They shot him point-blank in the street.
Then there was a man from Palermo who’d only been living in Corleone a short time. He disappeared. His name was Pietro
Montesanto, and he was a bit of a pansy. He used to wear a velvet suit that must have cost between thirty and thirty-five thousand lire, with kid-leather patches. Someone said to him: ‘Lower the flame or you’ll burst the pipe.’ Meaning, ‘Don’t show off too much or you’ll come to harm.’ His mother used to work spells and concoct poisons. The town here is full of people who’ve been crippled by these spells.
Then there was Pino Orecchione, the road-sweeper’s brother. They found him in the hamlet of Frattina with an army rifle slung round his body and his head stove in. He used to go round robbing the shacks to get something for his family, as he was out of work.
Then there was Vito Capra, who was killed in the town here. They guessed who it was that was sending out extorting letters; and they shot him one night.
Then there was another man called Selvaggio who was shot while he was bringing a load of corn into the town. The people say that he was a bit on the haughty side.
A man called Mariano Governale was killed at the second
crossroads
in Sant’ Elena. They shot him with buckshot and then split his head open with the butt-end of the gun. It was over a question of honour, people say.
Another stranger, who was employed at Madonna di Scala, was found shot dead in front of the Madonna del Mal Passo.
They cut off Mariano Scalisi’s hands after they’d shot him in the hamlet of Bingo.
They found another man dead in the hamlet of Pozzillo; but as he didn’t come from Corleone, no one took much notice here. Here in Corleone, they shoot people everywhere, wherever they happen to be. There’s not a corner of the town where some incident hasn’t occurred.
There was Salvatore Amenda. The people called him the ‘sheriff’ because he was a retired policeman. They shot him with buckshot. Buckshot is less chancy: you’ve only one bullet with a pistol. They say he was a scoundrel. ‘
Carnazza successe
– Only good for the
slaughterhouse
,’ as they say when a mule’s on the ground: by which they mean that it’s dead meat.
There’s another road in the neighbourhood called Via Vallone. They killed Michele Scuzzulato there; no one knows why.
At Bagarella there was a shooting affray in front of the chapel of St Christopher, as a result of a row over an engagement.
The Government protects the criminals here. Supposing you were to be killed, for example, they’d let your murderer out of prison after ten days. The Government is mad. It’s terrible how many people have been murdered here since the war. It’s happening all the time. Today, for example, one man will infuriate another, and for one wrong word he’ll be bumped off. Or it may be for a dispute over cattle. They take it into their heads to murder the fellow and that’s the end of that. One word can get a man murdered, something stupid. It’s their mentality. It’s habitual here. It makes no more impression on them than killing a goat or an animal. They’ll kill you or me to show that they’re the masters, always. And after the murder they always expect to get away with it.
Dr Michele Navarra, the leader of the traditional Mafia – and a dependant, as such, of Don Calò’s – was a man cast in a more conventional mould. Navarra, like Dr Melchiorre Allegra – whose police confession has already been examined – had passed over his soul to the Mafia and the devil for an excellent price. By a skilful manipulation of the Mafia network of mutual aid and graft the doctor had risen rapidly to become Medical Officer of Health, medical officer for the smallholders’ health insurance scheme, Inspector of Health for the area, and chairman of the hospital. Outside his purely medical interests, he was chairman of the local branch of the Christian Democratic Party, and President of the Cultivators’ Association of Corleone. He also had a valuable interest in an illicit slaughterhouse, where stolen cattle, kept hidden in the nearby Ficuzza wood, were slaughtered as required. The doctor’s
photographs
show him with a lined forehead and a sensitive, haunted expression, almost as though on the verge of tears over some unhappy memory. Despite the mildness of his appearance, he was given to arrogance – sometimes to impatience as well, as evidenced by his
supposed assassination of Dr Nicolosi who preceded him in the various medical posts he held. At a later period he was to make a novel contribution to the science of faking the polls by issuing several hundred certificates of blindness or extreme myopia to the women of Corleone, who were then accompanied by Mafia bullies into the polling booths, to make certain that they voted Christian Democrat.
* * *
It was against this composite background of the Middle Ages, and gunplay in the streets, that Placido Rizzotto set about organising the peasantry of Corleone. From the Mafia point of view, it was the story of a promising lad corrupted by army life. Placido had done an acceptable six months in prison in his extreme youth, and he came of satisfactory family. His father had been a low-grade mafioso who had been caught in Prefect Mori’s net, sent to
confino
, and thereafter been inactive in the organisation. But years in the army, including a period of fighting with the partisans in northern Italy, had provided Placido with new
perspectives
and thrown him out of step with the old life back in Corleone. For an ex-army sergeant and a partisan, he seems to have been remarkably gentle in his manner. He was slight in build and is reluctantly admitted by his friends to have been rather girlish in appearance. Placido contrived to see some good in most people, and amazed his fellow trade unionists, whose moral judgments were clear-cut and lacking in in-between shades, by arguing that even the terrible gun-slinging Mafia bullies of Corleone were the products, as well as prisoners, of a tragic environment. One of his frequently-quoted actions was the supply, at a time when paraffin was almost unobtainable, of some of the trade union centre’s stock to a Mafia-run farm. When asked to justify this eccentricity, he replied that, having had to do it himself, he knew what it was like to try and run a byre in winter with the butt-end of a candle.
Ingrained in the Sicilian mentality – beaten into it, one might almost say – is the idea that it is respectable to keep oneself strictly to oneself: not to hear the shot fired at night, not to see the figure escaping down the alleyway, to turn back at the sight of the body lying in the gutter ahead, to
know nothing of what is going on, to keep one’s own counsel, to leave other people to solve their problems in their own way. To the
downtrodden
Sicilian peasant the parable of the Good Samaritan is almost without meaning, and the conduct of its protagonist irrational. The response to Rizzotto’s urgings to unite and organise was slow. The whole conception of peasant unity, of fixing minimum wages, of demanding the division of produce according to the new laws, and of forming a co-operative with the ultimate intention of taking over uncultivated land, was too novel, and with the invisible presence of the Black Knight, Luciano Liggio – too frightening. Moreover, the police were suspicious of trade unionists, and the Church in western Sicily condemned them outright.
Rizzotto went from hovel to hovel convincing the doubters. In his own way he showed a flexibility of character that would have done credit to Don Calò himself. To refute the charge that as a trade union leader he must be an atheist, he took over the organisation of the annual festivities of the patron saint of the town, and provided more coloured bunting, more flowers, and more fireworks for less expenditure. In the end he grew on the people of Corleone, and they were willing to overlook his lack of manly gruffness and his un-Sicilian passion for bothering himself with other people’s affairs and for prying into things that didn’t concern him. He won over those who hung back from fear of the gunmen by a kind of infective courage. His argument was that only a few dozen out of Corleone’s population were members of the Mafia, and that if people got together and faced up to them, then the Mafia would be powerless. In the end Placido had ten thousand peasants behind him. Profiting from the mistakes of others, he gave the police no trouble. There were no
rabble-rousing
speeches, no symbolical occupation of uncultivated land; just a quiet, steady undermining of the enemy’s positions, and always with the law at his back. He worked to such good effect that while the Mafia was busying itself with the immense opportunities for self-enrichment of the postwar period, while Liggio was occupied with marketing his stolen beef, and while Dr Navarra was consolidating his medical monopoly, the citizens of Corleone voted in a left-wing town council.
With the Mafia hold apparently broken, Placido’s next move was the
logical one. His co-operative applied to the court in Termini Imerese for the redistribution of the uncultivated land of the Drago estate, and was successful. A few days later a commission was sent from Palermo to inspect the lands that were to be taken over, and Placido showed them round. A mafioso recalling this circumstance said that the only thing that surprised him from the Honoured Society’s point of view was that things had ever been allowed to get as far as this, particularly when one remembered that Placido Rizzotto’s father had been a man of respect – from which it was to be supposed that his son must be in the possession of dangerous secrets.
On March 10th, 1948, Placido Rizzotto went out for a stroll before supper, telling his parents that he would be back in half an hour. What follows is taken from a signed statement made to an examining magistrate two years later by Pasquale Criscione, a
gaballotto
of the Drago estate that was to be expropriated, and a rank-and-file member of the Mafia. Criscione had begun his statement by saying that he was an old friend of Placido Rizzotto’s. They had been born in houses facing each other in the same street, had always played together as children, and in later years ‘we used to go around together quite a bit, arguing about one thing and another, just like all the other fellows of our age did – but always in a friendly sort of way.’
On the evening in question, I’d been out as usual trimming up the vines. I came home, had a clean-up, and decided to take a turn in the square. Just outside the Café Alaimo I noticed a group of three people, two of whom I recognised: Placido Rizzotto and Ludovico Benigno. I went up to them – actually, I was going past them when Benigno pulled out a chair by way of a joke and held me up. Both of them being friends, we started to chat, and the third person went off. We were walking up and down the Via Bentivegna together until about ten o’clock. After that we dropped Benigno near his house by the new bridge, and carried on together towards the Piazza Garibaldi.
Just as we were going by the Café Alaimo again I was called across the road by a certain Luciano Liggio, an acquaintance of mine.
Turning round so that he had his back to Rizzotto, who was still waiting by the café, Liggio said, ‘Carry on with Placido as far as the Villa and remember, I’m behind you.’ I put up some sort of objection with the idea of getting to know what was behind it, but all he did was to pull up the right side of his jacket and put his hand on a pistol he had in his belt. He then said, ‘Do what I say, or I’ll kill you.’ Being aware of Luciano Liggio’s violent character and his reputation as a killer, there was nothing I could do but agree, so I went back to Rizzotto again.
Rizzotto didn’t ask me what Liggio wanted, and we started off again in the direction of the Villa. I noticed now that Liggio, having pretended to go off in the other direction, had turned round again and was following us. I made no attempt to put Rizzotto on his guard, and when he wanted to go back to the Piazza Garibaldi I went with him, but then induced him to turn back up the Via Bentivegna again. When we came to the end of the street I made out Liggio standing in the angle of a wall, and he signed to me to turn into the Via Marsala. I then suggested to Rizzotto that we should stroll on up the Via Marsala a bit and to this he raised no objection. We had just reached Triolo’s shop when Liggio came up from behind, took Rizzotto under the arm and pointed a gun into his ribs. He said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to shoot you. We’re just going to have a quiet chat, and after that you can clear off.’
When Rizzotto saw the gun he was startled and half put his hands up. We went up the street the way Liggio said, and after Triolo’s shop we turned into the Via Misericordia and after that the Via Sant’ Elena. At the end of the street last mentioned, where the straw shacks are, I saw Vincenzo Collura waiting. As soon as we came up, Collura pulled out a gun and took Rizzotto by his free arm … Liggio pointed his pistol at me and told me to go back home. He said that if I ever let a single word drop about what had happened he would finish me off. Knowing he was quite capable of carrying out his threat, I didn’t feel like arguing about it. I went back and dropped in at my brother-in-law’s house to ask how a sick cow of his was getting on.
